Grace
by the fish is dead
Summary: In this love, there is no grace. It's the worst kind of unrequited; he allows her his good humour. For her, it will never be enough. For him, it will always be too much.
1. Featherless and Bloodstained, I Stand

Worlds collide when he looks into my eyes. That fire I feel in my soul when he touches me burns warmer than the sun and soothes my mind to a point of insanity. When he speaks, every syllable of his words pound in my ears, and later when I lay in bed they are all I can hear. Birds no longer sound as sweet when he's around, and water never tastes as poor.

Hatred as I have never felt before freezes and inflames my soul, sending course bile to my throat, and rage to burn in my eyes, when he looks at her. Envious tar, origin of such true of only the Devil himself, bruises my veins when I watch them touch. Their daily exchanges leave me oblivious to the world, unaware of my surroundings but vivid to the pain.

I follow his lead. To his brilliance, to his chambers, to his faults. My own, complete person that used to flourish has moulded seamlessly into his broken one. My hopes still dangle that this might make him one, this might make him feel. The chords haven't been cut, but I'm choking.

As our bodies intertwine, as have they done so many times before, and they will so many more times to come, I realize that I am letting myself die. He holds the ropes, but I'm fingering the dagger.

I martyr myself, my spirit, for a twisted, broken love. For him and his brilliance and his aptitude and his unconventional charm. And my unconventional attraction. But for him, boredom is his motivation. Boredom drove him to seduce the mind and interest of a girl, and is what also draws him to perfection. The perfection of a woman.

My face in the mirror shines pale and freckled against the moonlight, curls of coarse brown hair framing my small face. Eyes stare back, big and brown. My cheeks are too red, and my lips too large. I feel my stomach and small, closely spaced ribs. My hands pass over my breasts - small, undeveloped, uneven. I see the face and body of a child in my reflection. I cannot feel innocence, but I can see it.

I forget to breathe. I forget to eat. The marks on my body are becoming obvious to others. I don't hear things anymore. Everything tastes like him, and everything smells like him. I don't meet my friends' eyes, I only meet his. Because I know what I won't see. I won't see feeling. I won't see regret. I will see me. I see myself, and for a moment, the innocence that haunts me has left, and the woman I know I am is staring back at me. In his eyes, I can see my world.

Worlds collide when he look into my eyes. I forget her. I even forget he is broken, and I see him as whole, and satisfied, and loving. Nothing matters – the world I sacrificied doesn't seem like a memory I wish I could remember, and the friends I gave up were worth losing. I can even see our happiness. Our blossoming, undying love. Our children.

But then he looks away.


	2. A Drop of Mercury From My Heart

_"Don't Try to Pick Yourself Up From This Fall," _

He would hear her tell herself. A blackened heart smoulders in her palm, and she lets her bludgeoned lips hang open, giving her a look of sheer unintelligence. Her incontrollable mop of hair scratches her faces, but time has passed to such a point where she can no longer feel it. Her deep wounds have not healed but been torn farther and farther apart until, no longer, is there anything left to destroy. She is open to the pain and the raw cruelty she is dealt by the hour, armed with the knowledge that it will simply pass through her.

His reputation does not stem from being a destroyer of lives. He is admired indifferently through the eyes of wholesome nobodies, and occasionally angst-ridden obstacles. She was meant to just such as the latter, a matter which he usually hurdled over with ease. His usual callous charm and icy wit were more than sufficient for defeating those which were placed so far below him. But she, she laid her cards down before him with more than just hope – she had a burning determination so large, anyone in her path could feel the radiation of it from miles ahead. She went all-in without a second glance at her better options. And she had _many_.

It was the first time he could remember that unprovoked stupidity entranced him.

He never desired. Such a sensation could only reach him at the tips of his fingers, and it was always slipping away. He considered himself to be a lucky man; undefeatable without the curse of lust. He had, surely, once had the ability to love, but that had been shaken off and stored deep within him under a different name and purpose years ago. He was truly, honestly, painfully self-dependant, and he savoured in vain every moment of it.

To name himself a good man would be a lie, foolhardy and insulting on his own tongue. There were many that would argue, saying he achieved things far greater than any ruined man ever could, but they would be wrong. He was not wholly a ruined man; he was far beyond that, stretched out into endless territory he could not identify. He had done both too much and too little to be a good man – this was a widely accepted opinion of him, and perhaps the truest. But then, what was left? Was his name one that should be uttered in foreboding tones, which shot unprecedented pulses of angry through the purest man's veins? The scars he had scratched at and broken, opening the dangers floodgates of what he was capable of, was only the beginning of the long list of crimes that conceded with the point of him being anything but a good man.

But she would disagree.

It almost, _almost_ brought a smile to his face as he thought this. It was a hard, honest truth, one of the few he could admit to himself. She, who had witnessed first hand the brunt of his rage, his bottomless hunger for just the taste of revenge, and his incalculable madness, could stand before any jury and vow that he was anything _but _a horrible man. It wasn't her naivety that would push her to speak these words, and think these thoughts; he knew as well as she did that such honourable traits were no longer identifiable to her. It was the one thing that drew him to her in the strongest of manners: her unjustifiable belief.

Not just in him, but in everything. When lightning struck her, she remained convinced that the thunder cloud had a silver lining. It disgusted him to the greatest of depths, but at the same time, unwillingly enthralling him, more than he every imagined anyone other than himself was able to do. This trait ... this twisted, unimaginable flaw she had bestowed deep within her soul, reminded him so closely of naiivity, but that it could not be. She had seen too much ... and what she had seen, she accepted.

She was so unlike the others, and for that, he could not keep away. For once, the barest of his instincts managed to grasp hold. Dangling on his tarnished strings, he could manage to relate to the girl.

But different as she may be, she would never be him.

And he was never very good at sympathy.


End file.
